He was needed in heaven?

when a young man died when swimming across a river his mother said god must have wanted him in heaven. Why didn't she think he wasn't wearing his life jacket? Or was he showing off. Maybe the water was too cold or maybe he and his parents were drunk. We do our best to warn people of dangers but when we don't listen, we get religion?

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Nola with all due respect how a parent deals with the loss of a child may not seem rational, what do you expect her to say......"serves the stupid kid right" using any or all of the hypothetical reasons you supplied.

There are probably two possible reasons for the mother saying something like that. If she truly does believe in god and heaven, then it is much easier for her to think of her son 'living the good afterlife' than to focus on his possible suffering as he was drowning. It's a nice 'distraction' for her during a time of mourning.

On the other hand, many people say things like that because it's what everyone expects them to say.

Sorry to hear that, but you're absolutely right. People have said the same load of crap to me about my brother. He died of Hodgkin's when he was 29. Had the same responses, "God needed him in heaven." Well what the fuck for? Another soul to kneel and kiss his ass for eternity? Is God that self-serving and insecure? So his widow can mourn him for the last 20 years, which the poor woman has? And those were basically the responses I gave, just more politely. I wanted to knock his damn teeth out, and if he was a stranger I probably would have.

But when you live your life by a fairy tale that discourages you from using your brain, I guess it's pretty difficult for these people to think about what they say rather than just blindly regurgitating what they're programmed to say. You can't expect people to think for themselves when every decision in their lives comes out of an owner's manual. Following along like good little sheep.

Right. It takes time and work to excise the scar tissue. Certain cues left me automatically raising my hand to begin the sign of the cross for years, but just now, I had to pause and work hard to come up with the term for that, because what originally came to mind was "that thing Catholics do with their hands."

It does seem reasonable to cut people some extra slack when berieving over a lost loved one. However the logic that they are needed by god for any reason is particularly lame.

I am reminded of how theists often back set from me when I state that I am a nonbeliever. Unabashedly they will admit that they are concerned that I will be struck by a lightning bolt. So what they are saying is that while they believe that this god of theirs is omnipotent and omniscient, they donot trust his aim while tossing his lightning bolts.

I believe that when I die, i will indeed "go to a better place"--annihilation, which is clearly better than this cesspool earth. So when a religio-tard at a funeral says, "He's in a better place," I nod sagely.